Trova
Trova is a style of Cuban popular music originating in the 19th century. Trova was created by itinerant musicians known as trovadores who travelled around Cuba's Oriente province, especially Santiago de Cuba, and earned their living by singing and playing the guitar. According to nueva trova musician Noel Nicola, Cuban trovadors sang original songs or songs written by contemporaries, accompanied themselves on guitar, and aimed to feature music that had a poetic sensibility. This definition fits best the singers of boleros, and less well the Afrocubans singing funky sones or even guaguancós and abakuá. It rules out, perhaps unfairly, singers who accompanied themselves on the piano.
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Trova musicians have played an important part in the evolution of Cuban popular music. Collectively, they have been prolific as composers, and have provided a start for many later musicians whose career lay in larger groupings. Socially, they reached every community in the country, and have helped to spread Cuban music throughout the world.
The founders
, born José Sánchez, is known as the father of the trova style and the creator of the Cuban bolero. He had some experience in bufo, but had no formal training in music. With remarkable natural talent, he composed numbers in his head and never wrote them down. As a result, most of these numbers are now lost forever, though some two dozen or so survive because friends and disciples wrote them down. His first bolero, Tristezas, is still remembered today. He also created advertisement jingles before the radio. He was the model and teacher for the great trovadores who followed him.The first, and one of the longest-lived, was Sindo Garay, born Antonio Gumersindo Garay Garcia. He was the most outstanding composer of trova songs, and his best have been sung and recorded many times. Perla marina, Adiós a La Habana, Mujer bayamesa, El huracán y la palma, Guarina and many others are now part of Cuba's heritage. Garay was also musically illiterate - in fact, he only taught himself the alphabet at 16 - but in his case not only were scores recorded by others, but there are recordings as well.
In the 1890s Garay got involved in the Cuban War of Independence, and decided a stay in Hispaniola would be a good idea. It was, and he came back with a wife. Garay settled in Havana in 1906, and in 1926 joined Rita Montaner and others to visit Paris, spending three months there singing his songs. He broadcast on radio, made recordings and survived into modern times. He used to say "Not many men have shaken hands with both José Martí and Fidel Castro!" Carlos Puebla, whose life spanned the old and the new trova, told a good joke about him: "Sindo celebrated his 100th birthday several times – in fact, whenever he was short of money!"
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José 'Chicho' Ibáñez was the first trovador to specialize in the son and also on guaguancós and afrocuban rhythms from the abakuá. He played the tres rather than the Spanish guitar, and developed his own technique for this Cuban guitar. During his extremely long career, Chicho sang and played the son in streets, plazas, cafés, nightclubs and other venues throughout Cuba. In the 1920s, when the sextetos became popular, he was forced to sell his compositions to these larger groups and their composers in order to survive. His compositions include Toma, mamá, que te manda tía, Evaristo, No te metas Caridad, Ojalá ; Yo era dichoso, Al fin mujer ; Qué más me pides, La saya de Oyá. He worked throughout Cuba, and latterly a short film was made of him.
The composer Rosendo Ruiz was a trovador almost as long-lived as Ibáñez and Garay. He wrote the criolla Mares y Arenas in 1911, the workers' anthem Redención in 1917, the bolero Confesión, the guajira Junto al cañaveral and the pregón-son Se va el dulcerito. He was the author of a well-known guitar manual.
Manuel Corona started his career in a red-light district of Havana. Originally a singer-guitarist, he became a prolific composer after his hand was damaged by a pimp's knife. It was a case of "She was a whore, and she had her man, but I loved her". Alberto Villalón advanced the trova guitar technique and had a hand in the birth of the son septetos.
Garay, Ruiz, Villalón and Corona were known as the four greats of the trova, but Ibáñez and the following trovadores should be regarded as of equally high stature.
The 20th century
; Eusebio Delfín ; María Teresa Vera ; Lorenzo Hierrezuelo ; Joseíto Fernández ; Ñico Saquito ; Carlos Puebla and Compay Segundo were all great trova musicians. And let's not forget the Trío Matamoros, who worked together for most of their lives. Matamoros was one of the greats.Most trovadors were creolized, drawing from both Spanish and African traditions and styles even-handedly. There were exceptions. Guillermo Portabales and Carlos Puebla were mostly in the guajiro tradition, whilst El Guayabero - Faustino Oramas - was black and funky in style and content. He was the last of the old trova, the oldest working musician in Cuba, at 95, when he died. His double entendres were a joy.
Trova musicians often worked in pairs and trios, some of them exclusively solo. As the sextetos / septetos / conjuntos grew in popularity many trovadores joined in the larger groups.
The technique of guitar-playing gradually improved; the early trovadors, being self-taught, had rather limited techniques. Later, some tapped into classical guitar techniques to revive the accompaniment of the trova. Guyún studied under Severino López, and developed a modern concept of harmony, and a way to apply classical technique to popular Cuban music. He became more adventurous, yet still in Cuban vein, and in 1938 stopped performing to devote himself to teaching the guitar. This bore fruit, and two generations of Cuban guitarists bear witness to his influence.
Perhaps the greatest guitarist amongst modern Cuban trovadors is Eliades Ochoa, the leader of Cuarteto Patria. Ochoa learnt both Spanish guitar and the Cuban trés; Cuban composer and classical guitarist Leo Brouwer told him that he did not need to learn more about musical technique as he already knew too much! Ochoa plays now with an eight-stringed guitar. Cuerteto Patría includes his brother Humberto Ochoa on guitar, son Eglis Ochoa on maracas, William Calderón on bass, Aníbal Ávila on claves and trumpet, and Roberto Torres on congas.
Offshoots of the trova
The trova movement has given rise to offshoots which have grown in the fertile musical earth of Cuba and other Latin-American countries. The following are elements in the trova's great influence:Filin
The word is derived from feeling; it was a US-influenced popular musical fashion of the late 40s and the 50s. It describes a style of post-microphone jazz-influenced romantic song. Its Cuban roots were in the bolero and the canción. Some Cuban quartets, such as Cuarteto d'Aida and Los Zafiros, modelled themselves on U.S. close-harmony groups. Others were singers who had heard Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan and Nat King Cole. Filín singers included César Portillo de la Luz, José Antonio Méndez, who spent a decade in Mexico from 1949 to 1959, Frank Domínguez, the blind pianist Frank Emilio Flynn, and the great singers of boleros Elena Burke and the still-performing Omara Portuondo, who both came from the Cuarteto d'Aida.The filín movement, which originally had a place every afternoon on Radio Mil Diez, survived the first few years of the revolution quite well, but somehow did not suit the new circumstances and gradually withered, leaving its roots in jazz, romantic song and the bolero perfectly healthy. Some of its most prominent singers, such as Pablo Milanés, took up the banner of the nueva trova.
Nueva trova
The Cuban Nueva trova dates from the 1967/68, after the Cuban Revolution of 1959, and the consequent political and social changes. It differed from the traditional trova, not because the musicians were younger, but because the content was, in the widest sense, political. Nueva trova is defined, not only by its connection with Castro's revolution, but also by its lyrics. The lyrics attempt to escape the banalities of life by concentrating on socialism, injustice, sexism, colonialism, racism and similar 'serious' issues. Silvio Rodríguez and Pablo Milanés became the most important exponents of this style. Carlos Puebla and Joseíto Fernández were long-time trova singers who added their weight to the new regime, but of the two only Puebla wrote special pro-revolution songs.The regime gave plenty of support to musicians willing to write and sing anti-U.S. or pro-revolution songs; this was quite a bonus in an era when many of the traditional musicians were finding it difficult or impossible to earn a living. In 1967 the Casa de las Américas in Havana held a Festival de la canción de protesta. Much of the effort was spent applauding causes that would annoy the U.S. government. Tania Castellanos, a filín singer and author, wrote ¡Por Angela! in support of Angela Davis. César Portillo de la Luz wrote Oh, valeroso Viet Nam. These were hot topics of the 1970s, but their topicality declined as time passed.
Nueva Trova, initially so popular, was dealt a blow by the fall of the Soviet Union, though it was already fading. It suffered inside Cuba, perhaps from a growing disenchantment with one-party rule, and externally, from the vivid contrast with the Buena Vista Social Club film and recordings. Audiences round the world have had their eyes opened to the extraordinary charm and musical quality of the older forms of Cuban music. By contrast, topical themes that seemed so relevant in the 1960s and 70s now seem dry and passé; once a theme is no longer topical, the piece rests solely on its musical quality. Those pieces of high musical and lyrical quality, amongst which Puebla's Hasta siempre stands out, will probably last as long as Cuba lasts.